[taspeotis]

Matt Levine writes a bit about this - the Elon Musk Mars Conglomerate. And really if you're investing into e.g. SpaceX you're not investing into SpaceX you're investing into the Elon Musk Mars Conglomerate. And most people seem to want that.

Tesla's the odd one out: it's public but it's still in there, although Musk would probably prefer it to be private too.

[fnordpiglet]

Tesla is the free cashflow play that is probably the most important for mars as there is no distilled fermented dinosaur juice on mars, but considerably more by ratio of lithium / oil than the Earth. Our flintstone fire mobiles won’t work so well there, and battery / solar will be important there for everything, including mobility and armies of slave robots.

[monocasa]

Mars gets less sunlight on a good day for solar power; the inverse cube law really hits you harder than you'd think. And that's before accounting for the planet wide dust storms that can last for months.

We're probably looking at nuclear fission generators to get started, then converting to geothermal at any appreciable (and maybe fusion, inshallah).

[fnordpiglet]

Regardless, fission, geo, fusion don’t fit well on a rover. The boring company makes the tunnels, Tesla makes the vehicles and robots, and batteries. Likely we will still use solar despite poor relative performance for bootstrap.

[monocasa]

RTGs do. That's what Perseverance and Curiosity use today.

[utopiah]

Right, right, all those facts... that's nothing compare to Musk's genius and will! /s

[mandeepj]

> Elon Musk Mars Conglomerate

That’s SpaceX’s version of Tesla’s self driving car pipe dream

Edit - I use self-driving car and Autopilot interchangeably

[jamiequint]

It's so pipe-dreamy that I used it for an hour today through SF rush hour traffic. Clearly never going to work though, right? right???

[SpicyLemonZest]

Did you follow Tesla's published instructions on how to use it (https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/modely/en_us/GUID-2CB6080...)? You're explicitly forbidden, for example, from assuming that it's going to make the right decision at intersections; you must manually inspect each intersection and evaluate whether it's "safe and/or appropriate" to continue. You're also not allowed to look away from the road or use your phone. YMMV, but to me that level of required attention doesn't match the term "self-driving".

What I see a lot of people do, unfortunately, is reconcile this contradiction by not following the published limitations of the "Full Self-Driving (Supervised)" product. They assume that Elon Musk wouldn't call it that if it couldn't be trusted to do what they expect. Then they get into fatal crashes, and someone sues, and Tesla argues that they can't be held accountable for bad drivers who don't follow the rules.

[jamiequint]

Your claim was that the product doesn't work, and I'm telling you it works without intervention consistently and in complicated traffic situations.

Any argument about how people don't pay enough attention since it isn't yet certified as a L4 system is irrelevant and tangential to the point.

[mandeepj]

Your definition of Tesla's self-driving product is very different than what Tesla itself promised, and that's what the person you are replying to...is telling you as well.

[jamiequint]

Anyone who thinks it is pipe dream given how it works today + rate of change is clueless, and that is putting it kindly.

[ignoramous]

Isn't Tesla FSD good enough and trending in the right direction to be called a "pipe dream"?